Danny Burns Analyzes the Resistance to Thatcher’s Poll Tax

Danny Burns’s book Poll Tax Rebellion
(AK Press, 1992) tells the story of the
grassroots tax resistance campaign that sank the poll tax in Britain and
dragged Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long reign as British prime minister down
with it.

Background

Margaret
Thatcher’s span as British prime minister included a paring down of the
welfare state, aggressive attempts to reduce the power of organized labor,
privatization and deregulation, and a flattening of the tax rate. You may
recognize this deck of cards as being similar to what Ronald Reagan played
with in this same time period (the 1980s),
and indeed the two were influenced by a similar set of economists and
ideologues.

The poll tax was meant to replace local property taxes, which had been set on
a local, council-by-council basis. Thatcher-aligned Conservatives disliked
these property taxes, which were often raised by left-leaning local councils,
and which applied only to property owners (or, indirectly, to renters). Using
an argument familiar to those following current debates about the personal
income tax in the United States, these critics said that because many voters
did not pay these taxes, but received the benefit of the government services
the taxes paid for, they were biased toward ratcheting up the tax rate to
effectively confiscate and redistribute wealth from property owners, which
was unfair to those taxpayers and had negative consequences in general. To fix
this problem, they believed the tax should instead be applied to everybody
alike. And in case the resulting voter pressure wasn’t enough to keep the
rates down, the central government should have the ability to cap the poll tax
and prevent spendthrift councils from raising it too far.

And so the poll tax was born. It faced immediate opposition, but at first it
was unclear how this opposition would take form. The Labour party wanted
people to petition and protest against the tax, but they mostly wanted people
to resent it and to identify it with the Conservatives because Labour
saw it as a winning issue — the party had no interest in trying to actually
defeat the tax as they felt it worked to their advantage. In
addition, Labour worried that if people tried to avoid the tax, for instance
by not registering as residents of a tax district, they might also try to stay
off the voter rolls and thus reduce Labour’s pool of potential voters.

To those targeted by the tax, though, resentment and protest were not going
to be enough. For people at the bottom of the income and wealth scale, the
poll tax was a considerable hit, and resistance wasn’t just an option, but a
necessity. Mass-resistance to the tax was organized in a strikingly
grassroots fashion, often confronting antagonism not only from the government
but also from establishment opposition parties and organized labor.

The resistance to the poll tax was widespread, varied, and ultimately
successful. In 1990, Thatcher resigned as prime minister and a new team took
over the Conservative party and immediately flung the albatross of the poll
tax from its neck, replacing it with a tiered-rate property tax.

Today I’m going to review some of the tactics that made this campaign
successful.

Propaganda and spin

The very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup for the opposition. The
government had rolled out the program with the benign-sounding name “community
charge,” but the “poll tax” name stuck. Poll taxes are never popular, and
resistance to poll taxes has a resonance in British history with previous
popular struggles.

The victims of the poll tax were a sympathetic lot, including pensioners,
the disabled, poor families, student nurses, and people with elderly live-in
family members, and the resistance movement was not shy about using this to
its advantage.

Public burning of tax bills, and frequent leafletting and postering kept the
resistance in the public eye and made sure people knew there was an ongoing
resistance campaign. A community arts group created a travelling performance
about the poll tax and how to resist it, and enacted it in various
communities.

Take pride in resistance

Some councils tried the old trick of publishing a list of people who were
behind on their taxes as a way of “shaming” them before their neighbors.
Instead, when this happened, people who were resisting their taxes but who
were not on the list wrote letters-to-the-editor of the periodicals where the
lists appeared to ask why their names had not been included on the roster.

Myth and legend

The resistance movement summoned up images from respected tax resistance
campaigns of Britain’s past as a way to make its movement seem more
respectable and part of a patriotic lineage. There were references to the
women’s suffrage movement and the American revolution, but even more often to
Wat Tyler’s poll tax rebellion of the
14th century.

The phrase “No Poll Tax Here,” seen on many of the signs and posters used by
the resistance movement, also hearkened back to the Reform Act-related tax
resistance of the 1830s, in which people
placed “No Taxes Paid Here” signs in their windows.

(The anti-poll tax resistance was so popular and successful that nowadays
it is the model hearkened back to by movements like the current
resistance to the Household Tax in Ireland.)

Surveys

On at least one occasion, the resistance movement took a door-to-door survey
of households both to gauge their interest in resisting, and as a pretense
to spread the resistance idea. One result of the surveys was that between the
people who planned to pay, and the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay was
a large (55%) middle-ground of people who were sympathetic with resistance and
would be willing to resist if they knew enough people were with them. On
seeing this result, Burns says, “we knew that non-payment was going to be
massive.”

Another clever variety of survey was this:

[One] group then mass-produced a window poster which said “No Poll Tax Here.”
The poster was dropped through the letter-boxes of 2000 households and the
group waited to see who put them up. Posters appeared in about 100 windows.
Activists the went round and spoke to these people individually, inviting
them to attend the next organising meeting…

Drown them with paperwork

Implementing the poll tax required registering everyone in the United Kingdom,
and keeping track of them as they moved from one council district to another.
The people who designed the poll tax program underestimated how difficult it
would be to do this adequately, even if there hadn’t been a lack of enthusiasm
for the project by the individual councils or outright opposition from those
being taxed.

Some of the earliest resistance tactics aimed at exacerbating this problem,
and the only tactic promoted by the Labour party that could be described as
an actual resistance tactic falls in this category:

[The “Stop It” campaign’s] one serious initiative was the “send it back”
campaign, which told activists to return the registration forms and ask
awkward questions of the council officers. Its aim was to delay the system
and to make “a legitimate protest.”

Burns notes that this was of questionable effectiveness, in part because it
was not pursued very vigorously, and in part because by encouraging people
to register in any form — even in a temporarily obstructionist way — this
provided registration information to the poll tax collecting authorities that
could later be used against resisters.

Clogging the bureaucracy with paperwork was nonetheless an effective tactic,
particularly later in the resistance struggle as the councils had to go
through the process of pursuing those who did not pay:

…councils were inundated with correspondence. Many people genuinely didn’t
understand what the Poll Tax was about. Others mounted campaigns to delay
registration by endlessly asking questions about the form. All of these had
to be answered. Councils sat under a mountain of paper. Everything they did
seemed to create more work.

The paper-work involved with administering the charge is enormous — and
likely to get worse. Backlogs switch from one area of activity to another.
Indeed, local authorities cannot really do anything without generating more
paper-work. If they attempt to canvas more people for registration they will
also produce more people who will refuse to register.

–Poll Tax Legal Group

Make enforcement expensive

Whereas in the past, summonses issued by councils against people in arrears
on their taxes had been pro forma things, rubber-stamped by judges without the
summoned defendant even being expected to turn up — when people were given
summonses for their poll taxes, the resistance movement encouraged them to go
to court and to use whatever means they could to stretch out the time of their
court appearance.

Mathematically, if even a fraction of the people summonsed actually turned up
in court and were given even a few minutes of time to explain themselves,
the courts would be unable to handle the load. Local Anti-Poll Tax unions
trained members in the law so they could help individual resisters stand up
for their rights in court.

There were frequent examples in which thousands of summons were dismissed for
technical errors or just because the courts were overwhelmed.

Warn people enforcers are coming

In a strategy modeled on one used in South Africa’s apartheid-era townships,
neighborhoods declared themselves “no-go” areas for sheriffs, and posted
watchouts to warn people if bailiffs or other enforcers were on the way.

Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was
equipped with CB
radios and squadrons of cars. Telephone trees were organised; bailiff
companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and
distributed to activists in all the local areas.

The Camden group recruited taxi firms to keep an eye out for bailiff vehicles
while they did their rounds and to call in their spottings.

Try to win over tax collectors and collaborators

The movement tried, without success, to convince local councils — many of
which were left-leaning and not sympathetic to Conservative policies — to
resign their offices, or to illegally refuse to enact their budgets according
to the poll tax law. They also failed to convince the labor union representing
the workers who worked in the bureau enacting the poll tax to refuse to
implement the tax.

The movement had unexpected allies, of a sort, in the bailiffs who were
assigned to distrain goods from tax defaulters. Being used to unorganized,
ashamed, impoverished pushovers, these collection agencies were overwhelmed by
organized resistance and found themselves unable to recoup the expenses of
collection. For this reason some went bankrupt, while others were reluctant
for merely financial reasons to handle cases of distraint for failure to pay
poll tax.

Social boycott of tax collectors and collaborators

The movement also used the threat of shunning or boycott to discourage people
from cooperating with the poll tax. The government tried to recruit
newsstands to be deposit points for poll tax payments, as convenient
supplements for government-run depots like post offices. But when the
resistance movement got wind of this, “communities made it plain that they
would no longer use the shops” of those who collaborated in this way.

Intimidate tax collectors and collaborators

In some cases, the intimidation went beyond threats of boycotts and shunning
to vandalism and violence:

Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have
become agents… to collect the community charge… one agent in Patchway has now
declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window…
[another] had the words “Poll Tax scab” and “you’re the first” scrawled in
white paint across his window. A Circle K store in Cardiff… had its door
locks jammed with superglue.

Posters implicitly or explicitly threatening bailiffs and judges with lynch
mob justice were not uncommon:

One showing a vicious dog, read “Bailiffs? Make my day!” Another showing a
picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun [sic] looking out
from behind the curtains, read: “Bailiffs we’re ready.” A third showed a
picture of a bailiff swinging in a noose. It read “Dead bailiffs don’t knock
on doors. In some areas bailiffs and registration officers were photographed
and their portraits were reproduced on posters which read “wanted” and listed
their “crimes.”

Some canvassers quit their jobs under the pressure of such violent threats,
and one committed suicide with his family blaming it on being “sworn at and
threatened” by those he encountered. On one occasion, molotov cocktails were
thrown at an (unoccupied) poll tax office.

A large group of protesters converged on and surrounded the home of the head
of a bailiff company. Finding him not at home, but his garage door open, they
held a mock auction of his property.

Destroy or disable collection apparatus

There is one plausible story in the book of a poll tax office’s database being
compromised and a large percentage of registered people being deleted from the
system. On one occasion, a bailiff’s vehicle had its tires slashed. On
another, resisters occupied the poll tax office, took up stations at the
payment windows, and told people who had come by to pay their taxes to go home
instead as the tax had been rescinded.

Blockades, occupations, and barricades

Several attempts by bailiffs to seize property from resisters were foiled by
blockades of hundreds of protesters, several deep, surrounding the resister’s
home and preventing access. Sometimes this would extend to barricading the
streets of a neighborhood, and in at least one case, of an entire town.

There were also several examples of groups of protesters occupying government
and law-enforcement offices, courtrooms, and council chambers in such a way as
to make business there come to a halt.

Publish and distribute how-to guides

A group of legal advisors assembled a series of bulletins and a how-to guide
to help people become familiar with their legal rights and with the process
the law was likely to take in their cases. This gave them the confidence to
pursue their resistance up to the limits of their comfort level, and also the
techniques to make their resistance most effective.

Census resistance

Non-registration was as important as non-payment, and had to be pushed early
in the campaign, while the Labour and other mainstream liberal opposition was
still advising people to register but be angry about it.

When resisters were served with a liability order, it would be accompanied by
a questionnaire that included questions about the resister’s employment (which
could be used to help the government seize the resister’s paycheck). Although
it was legally mandatory to fill out these questionnaires, and penalties were
threatened against those who refused, only about 15% of the people who
received such questionnaires returned them.

Engender and maintain activism and solidarity

Everybody potentially had a role to play in the resistance. People who did
not owe tax could be legal advisors or join phone banks. Even children served
as lookouts to watch for bailiffs.

The most successful groups used a bottom-up organizing model, where most
decisions were made independently in small, locally-convened groups of
resisters. This served to empower individuals and to encourage them to rely
on their own initiative rather than on the decisions of a far-off activist
elite.

Here’s an interesting technique for bringing people together:

An independent television company approached the Easton group in order to
work with us on a film about the Poll Tax. The film was never shown, but the
way the community was engaged in the process of making it is instructive. The
film producers wanted a shot of all the doors in the street, opening one by
one as the occupants came out of their houses with banners and signs.
Charles, the local street rep, went round to people’s houses every evening
for a week and explained to them what was wanted. Out of 30 houses in the
street (a cul-de-sac) 28 agreed to participate. The street is multi-racial
with a fairly wide class mix. It was inspiring to see white working class men
standing shoulder to shoulder with Asian women and their kids, holding the
same banners and engrossed in conversation. Some of them had never spoken to
each other before. …[V]irtually every one of those households joined the
Union, and most still had posters in their windows a year later. People were
brought into the campaign, not through a leaflet or a canvasser, but through
an interesting activity. They didn’t have to go to the campaign, it came to
them.

Support and assist arrested & imprisoned resisters

When people received summonses, they could call a hotline number to get an
information package in the mail. These numbers were posted on walls and
utility poles all over. Volunteers were given legal training so that they
could help summonsed people as informal legal advisors, and a more formal
and credentialed legal advisory group in turn advised them.

Brian Wright, the first resister imprisoned for failure to pay, got 800 cards
and letters from well-wishers while in jail, and hundreds demonstrated outside
his cell.

The police cracked down on anti-poll tax demonstrations, in what seemed
to the demonstrators like a deliberate attempt to turn them into bloodbaths,
intimidate people from participating, and divide the movement into “lawless”
and “respectable” factions. This seemed to work to some extent, at first, as
some prominent spokespeople for the anti-poll tax movement distanced
themselves from those arrested for “rioting.” But an independent group formed
and dedicated itself to defending anyone arrested at these demonstrations,
and organized itself in such a way as to be solely representative of the
defendants (not of any other organization). Volunteers were sent to every
police station to welcome demonstrators as they were bailed out, and the
organization was able to share resources (like videotape disproving police
testimony) and tactics among legal teams representing different defendants.

…a prisoners support group was set up… supporting 27 long-term prisoners. …
The TSDC
made sure each prisoner was written to at least once a week by members of the
campaign and visits to prisoners were coordinated through the campaign. Those
who had been inside offered support and advice to those who were about to be
convicted, and a newsletter was produced which published the letters of
prisoners. The campaign… paid for newspapers and books; a Walkman cassette
player for every prisoner; £10 a month income (the maximum they are allowed).
In addition to this some of the families were offered limited financial
support for visits…

Conclusion

The resistance campaign that defeated the poll tax was diverse and creative in
its tactics, and its success makes it a model worth learning from. Danny
Burns’s book about the campaign is a helpful overview of these tactics and
of the dynamics of how they were applied.

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